Hello,
For the past two days I've been trying to get a three local test servers up
and going with php. All of them use IIS under Windows XP Pro, two with
version 5.1 and the other with version 6.0 (the latter on a Windows XP Pro
x64 machine). Yesterday I was working on the x64 machine and got IIS up and
running satisfactorily. Then I downloaded and followed the instructions for
installing and configuring php 5.1.1 manually. All of a sudden the web
server seemed to be broken. Whenever I'd try to use it I'd get one of a
variety of messages, typically an HTTP 500 internal server error, "This page
cannot be displayed." (I'm in a different location today, working on a
different machine, so I can't reproduce the error message(s) right now.)
Today, working on a different machine, I decided to try the php installer
instead. It appeared to work fine. Then, realizing the advantages of the
manual install, I decided to download and install the manual version, after
first copying everything in my php folder to a safe place. I got as far as
copying the current files in the php folder to a safe place and copying the
unzipped files from the archive into the current folder for the php
executables. Then I started having the same issues with the HTTP internal
server error. I then deleted the newly copied files from the manual
installation and copied the original files back where they came from. The
problem persisted!
I should mention that I have a virtual directory attached to the IIS default
web site. I haven't changed anything in \Inetpub\wwwroot\ from the default
IIS installation. The virtual directory, named CUSR, resides under My
Documents.
After further investigation, I've come to determine that the system behaves
as follows:
1. Php works.
a. If I open IE6 and enter http://localhost/, IE opens two window,
one for the IIS help file and one for the "Welcome to Windows XP
Professional" document. This behavior is correct.
b. If I then enter http://localhost/cusr/index.shtml, everything
works as expected. In fact, I could omit Step a and still have this work
properly. The system displays the home page for my new web site.
c. If I then go back to http://localhost and from there enter
http://localhost/cusr/test.php (my php test script -- displays phpinfo ),
everything works fine. IE displays the phpinfo output. In fact, this even
works if I omit Step b.
2. Php doesn't work.
a. If instead of going first to http://localhost/ before going to to
http://localhost/cusr/test.php, on starting the browser on a random
(non-local) page and then I enter http://localhost/cusr/test.php, I get the
error message mentioned above and nothing else shows in the browser.
b. If I open IE to my regular home page, then navigate to
http://localhost/, then to http://localhost/cusr/index.shtml (which works
fine), and then to http://localhost/cusr/test.php, the latter sometimes
works and sometimes does not.
c. If I open IE6 to my regular home page, immediately navigate to my
prototype site's home page (http://localhost/cusr/index.shtml), and then try
opening the php test (http://localhost/cusr/test.php), sometimes I can do
it, and sometimes I cannot.
3. Firefox
The above behaviors were observed with IE6. Similar, but not necessarily
identical, behaviors have been observed with Firefox 1.0.6. Since the
problem opening the test.php document seems to come under only certain
circumstances, and then only some times, it's impossible to know if any
differences in behaviors is due to the two different browsers or just
randomness.
Can anyone out there (1) explain what's happening and (2) recommend a course
of action so that c:/localhost/cusr/test.php runs correctly first time,
every time?
Thanks.
Marsh Feldman
The University of Rhode Island
